SOURCE: de Alvarez, Leo Paul S. “The Soul of the Sojourner: Pericles, Prince of Tyre.” In Shakespeare's Last Plays: Essays in Literature and Politics, edited by Stephen W. Smith and Travis Curtright, pp. 197-215. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2002.

[In the following essay, Alvarez argues that Pericles's journey to understanding moves from external to internal as he realizes that the harmony of the soul is achieved through the union of three parts: the “appetitive, the spirited, and the intellective.”]

I

The story of Pericles¹ is one that, like the story of Troilus and Cressida, was very popular in the Middle Ages, as the story of Apollonius of Tyre. One of the principal tellers of the story was John Gower, who appears here, in the play, as the narrator. Gower is one who sings the old song. As Andrew Welsh puts it, “He is the ancient story-teller whose job it is to pick up this echoing tale from the even more distant past and to pass it on. …”² The song is an old, traditional song for the holy days. The song is especially good because it is old—the ancient is the good. But in latter times it is “wit” that is “most ripe.” The progress in wit is of course not a progress in goodness. The old things are to be heard, which are also the good things, sung by an old man; and, presumably, heard in the old way. Gower is brought to life from the ashes, and he is to waste his life like taper light to bring pleasure or a restorative. That is to be done by making men glorious—that is the purchase or burden of his song. To make men glorious, it seems, can especially be done by speaking of ancient things. Shakespeare has brought Gower to life; i.e., he has gone back to the beginning of the English poetic tradition. The story he is about to tell has this antique quality in terms of story and style.

The name “Pericles” may be drawn, it is speculated, from the name “Perillie” assumed by Apollonius in a French manuscript. It is also said that it may have come from “Pyrocles,” from Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia.³ Shakespeare, however, must have deliberately named his “Pericles,” since there is nothing in the sources that would lead him to do so. Why would he wish to make an association with the great Athenian statesman, as such a name must? We shall attempt to answer that question.

The opening of the play is pageant-like, and it is indeed like an ancient story. Those who come to court the beautiful daughter of Antioch must answer a riddle to win her, or be put to death. Pericles desires above all this beautiful princess, but in saying that his desire is to taste the fruit of a “celestial tree” (1.1.21), we are warned by the obvious biblical echo that there is some terrible prohibition here. The daughter is seemingly perfect; the perfections are given by nature but she is deadly, as is made all too evident by the heads of the decapitated failed suitors. Pericles speaks of the gods as having made him man and therefore one who is susceptible to love. He has the weakness of man, and the gods having inflamed desire in him he is now willing to die for that desire. In that willingness, he has, he says, come to know his “frail mortality” (1.1.43). The “fire of love,” as given by the gods, had made him ready for death, and he depends on nothing but faithfulness and courage.

He sees through the riddle to the evil that makes the woman unlawful and he finds in it sharp physic for his desire. The beauty of the daughter would have been a music to draw the gods, but the evil has destroyed her perfections. As Howard B. White says, Pericles must have some “inkling of evil,” to have divined the meaning of the riddle.⁴ The other princes never thought of it because it is an unthinkable thought. Pericles is capable therefore of thinking through to the most extreme of conclusions. That capacity, that understanding, turns out to be dangerous, and he can no longer stay in his city. An assassin, Thaliard, is commanded by Antiochus to follow and kill Pericles.

Antiochus is the last of the Greek kings to rule the East before the Romans came. With him, the Hellenistic age ends. That Shakespeare appears to be writing a history of Western Civilization is a point that has been especially made by Harry V. Jaffa.⁵ In this light, Shakespeare's “Greek Plays” begin with ancient Athens in A Midsummer Night's Dream, continue with the Trojan War in Troilus and Cressida, touch upon the time of the Peloponnesian War in Timon of Athens, bring us to the end of the Hellenistic age in Pericles, and hint at the coming of Christianity in The Comedy of Errors. We are then at the end of the ancient world, just before the coming of a new universal order. What remains of the ancient world would seem to be the deceitful promise of the love of the beautiful. That is, at any rate, how Pericles begins.

But why should the beautiful be first seen, in the play, as hiding a terrible secret? Certainly, what Pericles discovers is that the beautiful daughter who attracts so many suitors cannot be his or anyone else's. She belongs entirely to Antiochus.

The riddle begins with the feeding on mother's flesh. It goes on to speak of a confusion of relationships, of two sufficing to combine all the relationships of the family. One thing is evident—the two need not procreate, for there is no need for a third. Incest is the extreme love of one's own and extreme self-sufficiency. Is the self-sufficiency of the beautiful somehow related to incest? Perhaps the love of the beautiful that leads to a forgetfulness about death is somehow also to be found in the eros that leads to incest. In Plato's Republic, incest is one of the first crimes committed by the tyrant; it shows his disregard for all laws and conventions or his claim to complete self-sufficiency.⁶

Pericles, in his love, seems to be a perfect Christian knight. He is very aware of death and mortality and says that he is as a sick man, and yet his fire of love overcomes any fear. He becomes fearful and anxious only when he has been disabused of his love for the beautiful daughter. Thus the love of the beautiful, in Pericles at least, seems to be for that which can never belong to him. He is brought to seek the daughter because of the false appearance the king puts on, pretending that she might be given to someone else. However we may understand this situation, it is clear that the beautiful object of eros cannot be the animating principle or beginning for Pericles, that which gives order to the world and to his soul. The pattern of the play, as we shall see, is a constant return to beginnings. The question seems to be what the beginning or principle is to be for Pericles. It cannot be the beautiful princess, and Pericles must go into exile.

Although made an exile, Pericles is still able to do one thing. He saves a city from starvation and finds in Tharsus a temporary stopping-place. It seems strange, however, that he should go to Tharsus, which is closer to Antioch than is Tyre. It makes sense only if he intends to go westward.

Pericles explicitly contrasts his saving of the city with the conquest of Troy (1.4.92-96). Pericles is not a conqueror. He seems to be wholly unpolitical. He feeds the needy and asks only for love. The suggestion is that his act could easily lead to his being revered as a god. Gower tells us that Pericles does receive glory for his act. Perhaps then his new politics has more to do with relieving misery and feeding the needy than with conquest. The old politics is described by Cleon, and he cannot believe that Pericles would act otherwise:

                                        some neighboring nation,
Taking advantage of our misery,
Hath stuffed the hollow vessels with their power,
To beat us down, the which are down already.

(1.4.65-68)

We do not know if Pericles would have done such deeds if he had not been disabused of his love and he himself put into grave danger. The love that he says he now seeks is, of course, useful to him. He needs harborage for himself, his ships, and his men. Perhaps he would not have come to save Tharsus if he himself were not in need. But why should he not simply conquer Tharsus and hold it by force and not by gratitude? Is it because Antioch is too powerful? Pericles, however, seems to think that he can stay in Tharsus until the danger is over—until, he says, his stars smile again (1.4.109). Pericles appears to be beneficent for its own sake.

Is Pericles' beneficence somehow connected with that love for the beautiful which formerly ruled his soul? Or is it that which replaces that love? Is it the only kind of deed that is now left to that melancholy man described in his soliloquy in 1.2, whose soul is now dominated by anxiety and fear? Is such a soul unable to be political because it has been purged of anger or spiritedness? The danger from Antioch seems so great that political life no longer seems possible for Pericles.

A unique aspect of the play is the way dumb shows accompany the narration. We are told beforehand in 2.1, for example, that bad tidings are brought to Tharsus. Gower says, “What need speak I?” What we see is a letter given to Pericles and the messenger knighted. We are then told afterwards what the letter contains. It would appear, however, that we are dependent on Gower's narration and that the dumb show is what is superfluous. Shakespeare, through Gower, thus explicitly raises the question of the relationship between action and the word. Does seeing the action clearly convey its meaning, or do we need words to understand what we have seen done? The answer to this question will lead us to the significance of the play itself.

II

Pericles puts out to sea again, apparently without any destination in mind, for we are not told of any. Gower only says:

And that in Tharsus was not best
Longer for him to make his rest.
He, doing so, put forth to seas,
Where when men been, there's seldom ease.

(2.25-28)

Pericles loses everything in a storm at sea and must begin again. Is it his third or second beginning? Is his first beginning at Antioch or at Tharsus?

If it is his third beginning, then he has tried salvation, as it were, first, through his love of the beautiful, and, secondly, through what may be called philanthropy. Are these two connected with each other? He still speaks of love as that which is important to him. One expression of love would then be the assurance of the completeness of the world in finding the beautiful object of love to be also good. The other expression of love, in showing pity for the suffering and the needy, is to find the world incomplete and requiring remedy. One suspects that pity and bountifulness belong together with the love of the beautiful. For only if one believes that the world can be complete, ought to be complete, would one be troubled by its incompleteness or neediness.

The new beginning, then, of Pericles is made possible by three fishermen who not only give him fire and food, but also his father's arms. Pericles' loss of everything is shown by his coldness and nakedness. He has no fire, and the fire in his soul, the fire of love, seems to have been quenched in the formless sea.

The fishermen, men of the lowest class, look upon the political order as one in which the whales swallow the little fish (2.1.28). If they, the fishermen, were to rule, they would make the whales cast up everything they had swallowed. Political order appears to them to be simply unjust, even under the peaceful and good government that Simonides provides. Curiously, the fishermen seem to be Christians, for they speak of churches and steeples and fish for fasting days.

Pericles praises their comments. Howard B. White remarks that these fishermen “are probably the most reflective characters in this play.” He also points out that two of their names refer to some kind of covering and what they fish up is a covering.⁷ The fishermen are the saviors of Pericles, giving him the cover he needs to begin again. Pericles had only wanted to die, but the fishermen give him new hope, and, as the First Fisherman, who is unnamed, says, the gods forbid that they should let him die. Their labor done with mirth, says Pericles, is what brings him the cover he needs, in the sense of the food and warmth he needs and the armor required for noble deeds.

Pericles has apparently not used his armor but only kept it. Now, in necessity, he finds use for his father's armor. In a way, however, the armor is no longer his. He has had to beg it from the fishermen. It has been changed by the sea and is rusted; it no longer is what it was.

The task now for Pericles is not to solve a riddle but to act. Once again he faces a king and his beautiful daughter, but this time his task is not to solve a riddle but to act by jousting in the tourney. He now seeks to better his fortunes through noble deeds. Deeds are contrasted with appearances by Simonides, when Pericles first shows himself at court. Deeds are seen, and it is seeing which is especially important for Simonides and his daughter. But that seeing, of course, is not simply of the way something looks, but rather of what is done. The king, in commending the knights says:

Knights,
To say you're welcome were superfluous.
To place upon the volume of your deeds,
As in a title-page, your worth in arms
Were more than you expect, or more than's fit,
Since every worth in show commends itself.

(2.3.1-6, emphasis added)

In greeting the knights who present themselves at court for the triumph, three kingdoms are mentioned—Sparta, Macedon, and Antioch. No other places are mentioned, and one is reminded that these are the three kingdoms that successively had hegemony over the Greek world and the Mediterranean. One also notes that no knight from Athens is said to be present.

The devices and mottos on the shields of the knights are also described. The devices which Simonides remarks upon all have to do with fire. He especially comments on the device of a burning torch upside down, which, in his interpretation, would also describe Pericles' encounter with Antiochus's daughter:

Which shows that beauty hath his power and will,
Which can as well inflame as it can kill.

(2.2.34-35)

Pericles triumphs over all, and he is called an artist by the king. To speak of making is to emphasize the importance of the beautiful artifact, not the goodness of the deed. Does Simonides assume that the beautiful artifact and the good are one and the same? Pericles had made the assumption that the beautiful object of his love was also good, until he grasped the meaning of the riddle.

Pericles notes that Simonides is very like his father. Simonides is like the sun, surrounded by princes who sit about him like stars. He sees himself instead as a glowworm in the night. He previously had spoken of himself as a blind mole to Antiochus. We note the continued use of the image of fire, a fire that can only exist in darkness, almost unnoticed. He concludes with a reflection on Time, which says that Time gives men what it wills not what they want. Is Time indifferent to human ends? He seems to say that men can do nothing but bear up under whatever Time gives to them (2.3.37-47).

Simonides, noting the melancholy of Pericles, commands Thaisa to go to him, saying that the king has drunk a bowl to him. He speaks at the same time of how gods and princes should act. Princes and gods should give freely to those who honor them. Is this not a reply to Pericles' soliloquy? Princes and gods are to exercise virtues; they are not merely passive. As Simonides also says, “who hates honor hates the gods above” (2.3.22).

Later, Pericles is to say, in the midst of the tempest in which he loses his wife:

                                                                                          O you gods!
Why do you make us love your goodly gifts
And snatch them straight away? We here below
Recall not what we give, and therein may
Vie honor with you.

(3.1.22-26)

Man is better than the gods are. One wonders if man cannot simply replace the gods, or if what is attributed to the gods is not in truth done by man. Do not, in the end, Simonides and Pericles agree on the nature of the gods?

The relationships between king and daughter, as well as that of suitor and princess, are the reverse of those in the court of Antioch. Pericles does not seek Thaisa, Thaisa seeks him. Simonides also pretends to be harsh and overbearing, but is not. Above all, the relationship between Pericles and his daughter is quite the opposite of that of Antioch and his daughter.

The king declares that Pericles is to be the schoolmaster of Thaisa. What is she to learn from him? He knows arms, dance, and music. His schooling would therefore not be of the word, but in the graces of the body. The difficulty is that Simonides' court is full of such noble graces or noble deeds. Does Pericles have something else that Pentapolis lacks? There is, at any rate, a mystery about him that is remarked upon by the king (2.3.28-29).

The lords of Tyre are now impatient with Pericles' absence. They are persuaded to look for him when his old counselor, Helicanus, refuses to take the throne. That the throne can remain empty for so long is strange. Pericles is sought so that he may return to his public duties. We are perhaps reminded of Pericles' public duties because it is now possible for him to take them up again. The king of Antioch and his daughter are dead, killed seemingly by the justice of the gods. But the justice of the gods is to be belied by what follows. It is not Antioch that prevents the return of Pericles but rather the tempest, or perhaps it is the sea itself or the god of the sea. The tempest, however, is in truth in Pericles' own soul, as Gower is to tell us later (4.4.303-31). Pericles cannot return home because he himself does not know where home is, and he cannot rule—indeed he will become more passive, more unable to act. He cannot raise his own child, but must depend on others. His wife cannot find him, because, in a sense, he is nowhere to be found. His final state before he is reborn through Marina perfectly expresses his passivity and his randomness.

III

Gower begins Act 3 with the marriage feast and the conception of Marina. A dumb show immediately follows in which a letter comes to Pericles, over which Thaisa rejoices. We are only told afterward what it is over which she rejoices.

We have three dumb shows in the play, the first of which occurred at the beginning of Act 2. We note that at the end of that dumb show, he says: “What shall be next / Pardon old Gower; this 'longs the text” (2.Cho.39-40). He does not say it belongs to the action. He appeals to the imagination of the audience, who can see in their minds the tossing ship and the storm. Act 4 does not have a dumb show. Instead we have straight narration by Gower. He appeals again to the audience, not to their imagination but to their thoughts. Time is carried in rhyme, but it cannot be so carried except by the thoughts of the audience who must go the poet's way. The third dumb show does not come until scene 4 of Act 4. Pericles is seen lamenting at the tomb of Marina. This dumb show is the clearest of the three dumb shows, the one in which action and meaning are at one, but it also raises the most important questions, as we shall see. Here, in Act 3, we require narration to make clear what the letter, in fact, contains.

Pericles has shown himself to be the perfect knight, who lives according to all grace and honor, a champion in music and the joust, in arts and arms. His world is again shattered, however, for set upon the sea again, the birth of Marina is under such terrible conditions that Lychorida declares that the babe would die if it were able to perceive and understand the storm. No babe has ever had a birth under worse conditions. The very elements seem to be an enemy to the nativity. Marina is truly born into a harsh and nonhuman world; one that reveals the fragility and vulnerability of the human being. Pericles cannot believe in the goodness of the gods in such a world. The gods do not seem to be as compassionate and honorable as human beings. Lychorida advocates patience, and we must ask if Pericles can be patient if the gods appear to act either whimsically or with indifference to human things.

A sailor asks about courage, and Pericles replies that he has courage enough. It is not the wind he fears; what he exclaims against is chance destroying order, especially divine order. The sailors seem to be indifferent to the tempest; they know what to do and do not fear it. They are not, however, indifferent to having a dead body onboard the ship. Is their competence in a storm connected to what Pericles calls their superstition? The custom of the sailors rules. Perhaps it is the immediate peril that makes it impracticable for Pericles to go against the sailors' custom. Custom rules the ship, and especially so in grave danger. Do the sailors care about what rules the sea and the tempest? Or do the gods only rule onboard the ship?

Once again it is a lack of light and fire that shows nature to be unfriendly to human beings. To be in dire necessity is to be cold. Water and air are, of course, especially cold. Even in the difficult conditions that make necessary haste in casting the body of Thaisa into the sea, there is some preparation of the body and “a priestly farewell.” The body of the queen is not simply thrown overboard, but it is put into a watertight casket with spices, jewels, and a note. These preparations make her rescue possible. Ceremony makes one act as if there is the possibility of discovery, even though the coffin is to return to the primordial ooze (3.1.56-69).

We are now to turn to yet another principle, another beginning, and another world. The first name we hear in the next scene is that of Philemon, the name also of one of the epistles of St. Paul. We are at Ephesus, and Cerimon, a lord, calls Philemon to prepare fire and meat for those who have been caught by the storm. The gentlemen, and the landsmen generally, have been filled with terror at the tempest. They seem to have been more affected than were the sailors.

Cerimon is some kind of physician; he speaks of healing as a ministering to nature. But he tells a servant that his master is past recovery, for his art has limits. The gentlemen wonder at the way Cerimon puts himself to painful work despite his riches. The First Gentleman seems to think that nature is inclined to the pleasant, and that since labor is painful, no one would do it except when compelled.

Cerimon replies that he holds virtue and cunning to be higher than nobleness and riches. Nobility and riches are careless, not careful things, and immortality that attends virtue and knowledge therefore attends the careful. Cerimon desires immortality; that is, to be as a god. Can man become as a god through virtue and cunning? He has the secret art of physic, which he has learned through certain authorities (are these ancient?) and practice. He says nothing about the gods. He speaks instead of his knowledge of the natures of things, organic and inorganic, vegetable and mineral, and of the “the disturbances / That nature works, and of her cures” (3.2.36-37). Nature herself works the cures for the disturbances that she also causes. Man can conquer death and the non-human forces that threaten him. He indeed can be as a god. Can Cerimon also cure such a disturbance as a tempest? We are reminded, of course, of the power of Prospero over the tempest. Cerimon's ability to speak of the natures of all things is what gives him:

A more content in course of true delight
Than to be thirsty after tottering honor,
Or tie my treasure up in silken bags,
To please the fool and death.

(3.2.38-41)

He finds true delight and content, and he escapes the Fool and Death.

Cerimon does not mention what the Second Gentleman now mentions—Cerimon's apparently limitless charity. He heals, brings back to life the seeming dead, and gives freely from his own purse. Such charity gains the renown that nobleness and riches give. One can say that, with Cerimon, virtue and knowledge have completely replaced nobleness and riches, even with respect to honor. He combines with his knowledge the beneficence Pericles showed to Tharsus. The harshness of the elements that surround Marina's birth and the queen's apparent death is now balanced with Cerimon's knowledge that conquers necessity and, to a certain extent, the harshest necessity of all—death.

The casket of the queen is found and brought in. Cerimon at first believes it may be a treasure chest. The Servant tells him that a huge billow cast it upon the shore. Does it seem as if the sea itself was taking Thaisa to the only one who could save her? When the casket is opened, and Thaisa is discovered, Cerimon declares that “they were too rough / That threw her in the sea,” and he revives her through fire, music, and his art (3.2.78-79). We are reminded of the Egyptians and their medical knowledge—did Cerimon learn his art from them (3.2.81-94)?

When Thaisa awakens, Cerimon compares Pericles' loss to that of the loss of jewels and gold. Indeed, Thaisa seems always to be compared to noble and rich treasure. When Pericles loses Thaisa, does he part with that which embodies the noble?

In the third scene, Pericles leaves Marina behind in Tharsus. She is to be raised by Cleon and given princely training. Now the voyage to Tyre may indeed be too difficult for a baby in arms, especially after the terrible experience she had gone through. Pericles may be reluctant to expose her to more dangers. Does it make sense, however, to abandon her for fourteen years? It would seem that he forgets about her until she is full-grown. If Pericles cannot raise her, however, why should Cleon and Dionyza be chosen to do so?

Pericles must return to Tyre if he is to keep his kingdom or prevent it from falling into civil war. Cleon mentions how cruelly fortune has dealt with Pericles, and Dionyza speaks of how they would have been blest had Thaisa come to Tharsus. Pericles replies:

                                                                      We cannot but obey
The powers above us. Could I rage and roar
As doth the sea she lies in, yet the end
Must be as 'tis.

(3.3.9-12)

He accepts the buffetings of chance as inevitable. There are powers that cannot but be obeyed. He does not speak of the justice of these powers, but only that they cannot but be obeyed. Human beings are without choice, for the powers rule men despotically.

Pericles charges the charity of Cleon and Dionyza to take care of Marina. Cleon takes a vow that she will not be neglected and remembers how much Tharsus owes to Pericles. He speaks of the gratitude of the people and declares that should he not do his duty, the “common body” would force him to his duty.⁸ Moreover, if his nature needed another spur, the gods would revenge an act of ingratitude. The rule of Cleon does seem to depend upon the commons or the people, or, at least, he seems very aware of the power of the commons. Pericles, once again, does not want vows, as he did not wish Helicanus to make vows. He promptly takes a kind of vow to Diana. Are vows to be made only by men to the gods, but not to other men? Vows should not be taken between men because their word should be enough. They need only speak of what it is they promise to do and that should suffice. Should the gods have something more? Does Pericles expect more of men than of the gods? The relations between men are more settled and certain perhaps than the relation between men and the gods. Do gods ever make vows to men? They do not in this play. Why then should men take vows to gods? Are vows necessary when there are no clear laws to direct the conduct of one to the other?

Pericles seems to be expecting not to see his daughter until she is ready for marriage. Why is he willing to abandon her for so long?

In the subsequent scene, Thaisa seems to believe that Pericles has been lost forever, and she becomes a priestess of Diana. She declares that she will never have joy again. She also makes no effort to return to her father's kingdom. Why does she not send a messenger to Tyre to find out what has happened to Pericles? Is her passivity the consequence of the belief Pericles expresses that nothing can be done against what time or chance brings about?

The third act began with nature presented in its most hostile aspect to man. A baby is born in the midst of a terrible storm and its mother lost. Marina's beginnings are, to say the least, imperfect. The mother is too quickly cast overboard because of strong custom. What saves the queen is Cerimon's knowledge that can reveal the curative or kindly powers that are hidden in nature. The end of the act sees the family dispersed. Why they cannot be together is obscure and not immediately intelligible. Why could not Pericles have brought his daughter to Tyre? Why did Thaisa not send inquiries either to Pentapolis or Tyre? The tempest has scattered the family, but how we are to interpret that scattering is difficult.

IV

Gower begins Act 4 by telling us of the condition of each member of the family. Pericles is “settled to his own desire” (4.Cho.2), by which it seems to be meant that the nobles of Tyre have again acceded to his rule. It can also mean that he has found some respite to his wandering. Has he forgotten his adventures, now that he has regained his throne? But that would be belied by what subsequently happens. Marina would seem to be the most important thing to him, even if he has not paid attention to her for fourteen years. Thaisa is said to be woeful. We are now to bend our minds to Marina. Why we must turn to Marina we shall have to see.

Marina has been trained in music's letters, and she “hath gained / Of education all the grace.” It is the grace of education that makes of her a “general wonder” (4.Cho.8-11). The comparison of Marina with Philoten leads to envy on the part of her mother, Dionyza. Dionyza seeks to defend her own. Whatever grace there is in Philoten is darkened by Marina's light.

Dionyza plots with Leonine to murder Marina. Dionyza reminds Leonine of his oath, and she does not want either cold conscience, or flaming love, or pity to affect his soldier's resolve. The oath thus is to go against the natural tendency of each part of the soul. Cold reason should dissuade him from the act, as would spirited love and pity. Is there something unnatural then about oaths?

Leonine promises to keep his oath, but protests that Marina is “a goodly creature.” Dionyza makes the cynical remark that Marina is thus fitter for the gods.

Marina enters weeping for her nurse. It is our first sight of her and she is sorrowing. She declares that: “This world to me is a lasting storm, / Whirring me from my friends” (4.1.20-21).

Leonine is to take Marina near the margent of sea and kill her there. Once again, rescue comes from the sea when pirates seize Marina and save her from death. Marina had gone on the walk with Leonine to please Dionyza, who pretended to be concerned with her health. As she speaks to Leonine, Marina remembers the circumstances of her birth. The story of the first storm, as told by Marina, makes Pericles more active than he seemed actually to have been. She is now to suffer another storm as dangerous as the first one. She is to be alone, surrounded by those who seek to do her harm. The storm this time is, however, of the human passions, not of the elements.

Marina's exchange with Leonine shows her considerable powers of persuasion. When Leonine reveals that he is going to kill her, Marina first speaks of her own harmlessness in every way—to all creatures and, in particular, to Dionyza. Leonine replies that his is “not reason of the deed, but do't.” Marina immediately finds something in him to praise. She speaks of an act that she saw him doing, trying to part two men who were fighting and being hurt in consequence. She is indeed later described as especially able to speak persuasively. She addresses each one to whom she speaks in terms of a particular strength or weakness. She cannot move Leonine because, as he says, he is sworn.

The world Marina now enters is revealed by three Bawds in Mytilene to be a market economy in which everything is for sale and in which all nations participate (4.2). It is curious that here in Mytilene only the modern nations are named—Transylvania, Spain, and France—in contrast to Pentapolis where the Hellenistic empires were named. Transylvania, Spain, and France would seem to be linked by their Transmontane Catholicism, i.e., by their adherence to the papacy.⁹ Perhaps that is why no Germans or Englishmen are mentioned as being present at Mytilene. It may be that we are meant to see that which is to replace the ancient world.

The market economy so dominates Mytilene that even children are raised only for the sake of sale. The Pander, in speaking of his relationship to the gods, admits that his profession is no calling, but he needs money to retire (4.2.36). Money is necessary to make peace with the gods.

Marina is sold by the pirates to the three Bawds. She bewails the fact that Leonine did not succeed in killing her. The Bawd declares that Marina shall live in pleasure, and Marina denies it. She asks the Bawd, “Are you a woman?” To be a woman, one must be an honest one. Is Marina asking the question of what is by nature, which nature would then suggest or prescribe how one ought to live? The Bawd replies with violence. Marina “must be bowed” to the desires of the Bawd. Marina calls upon the gods to defend her, and the Bawd answers that since the gods defend by means of men, then Marina must be defended by men—comforted and fed and stirred up by men (4.2.58-84).

Marina declares her purpose to keep her virginity and calls on Diana to aid her. The Bawd asks, “What have we to do with Diana?” (4.3.140). Diana is first mentioned by Thaisa when she is resuscitated by Cerimon (3.2.106). Pericles takes a vow to “bright Diana” that his hair shall remain uncut until Marina is married (3.3.28). Afterward, we are told that Marina still wears the colors of Diana (5.3.6-7). Chastity seems to become the focus of the play. The contrast to the chastity of Marina is the lust of Antiochus and his daughter. Diana is not only the goddess of chastity, she is also the goddess of fertility and begetting, as her many-breasted image at Ephesus attests. With Antiochus' daughter, there was no possibility of begetting. Begetting had to be prevented, for it would have revealed the sin. Pericles, we remember, desired to propagate an issue from the beautiful daughter, but her unlawfulness and unchastity prevented that possibility. At the end of the play, Pericles says that Marina has begotten him again:

                                                                                O, come hither,
Thou that beget'st him that did thee beget.

(5.1.196-97)

The relationship between Antiochus and his daughter is reversed, and it is not a fleshly begetting, but one of the mind and the soul. Can Pericles be begotten again only from a chaste maiden? The chastity he fails to find in the daughter of Antiochus, he finds in his own daughter. Chaste Diana presides over chaste begettings or beginnings.

Marina is cried through, or advertised through, the marketplace, and the people are said to be greatly inclined to her. As Boult says, “They listened to me as they would have hearkened to a father's testament.” The response to the description of her is like the response to a father's will because there is the expectation of a rich reward that is also thought of as one's own. It is a heritage handed down, but we are certain in hearing a father's will, especially if there are many in the family, which part of that heritage one will receive. Every nation, says Boult, will come to her sign. But all these men and nations desire her for the wrong reason.¹⁰ One notes that they are attracted by hearing about Marina, just as Pericles was attracted to Antiochus's daughter by what he had heard. But where Pericles' desire was lofty, the desire for Marina is of the lowest sort. There is of course something the same in what brings men to the brothel and what brought Pericles to Antioch. Where Pericles found terrible lust in the beautiful court, those who come to the ugly brothel find true beauty. The greatest contrast is perhaps that between Pericles and Lysimachus, the one drawn by the appearance of beauty, the other by the desire for “deeds of darkness” (4.5.26).

To the variety of nations that are to be found in Mytilene, Gower is to contrast the one language, and therefore the unity, of the play (4.4.4-9). As Marina transcends where she is, so does the play transcend time, place, and language.

V

What is hidden in the soul may be said to be the next theme of the play. Cleon wishes he could undo Dionyza's deed, but he cannot bring himself to act against Dionyza (4.3.1ff). Morality and gratitude, his horror at the crime, virtue in general, prove to be weak against the love of one's own. Both are convinced that Marina is dead, and Dionyza builds a monument whose grandeur is meant to hide the wickedness of the deed.

The dumb show that follows is, we have said, the one whose action seems most clearly to convey the meaning. Gower says, “your ears unto your eyes I'll reconcile.” He will make what we see and hear be the same. What he tells us, however, is that what we see is “how belief may suffer by foul show” (4.4.21-23). Pericles is misled by the monument. The line that follows is ambiguous, for while it says that this “borrowed passion” of Cleon and Dionyza may “stand for true-owed love,” we may also take the line as applying to the actor playing Pericles, whose “borrowed passion” works on our belief.

At the beginning of Act 5, in his narration, Gower again speaks of the difference between action and narration, or action and speech. Again, what he says is ambiguous:

Where what is done in action, (more, if might)
Shall be discovered.

(5.Cho.23-24)

Is there anything more to discover in action? Might one discover more in action? Or can all be said, and is action then superfluous?

The presence of Gower makes it seem as if the poet is there to remind us, the audience or reader, of the difference between speech and deed, narration and action. We are told in Plato's Republic that narration differs from imitation in that the speaker does not become the character of which he is speaking.¹¹ Narration strips the account of color, and we are not charmed into believing ourselves transported to another world. Yet Gower's presence raises the question of Shakespeare himself. What we have, in other words, is the imitation of a narrative, which reminds us that the action we are seeing is false, that the false grief of Cleon and Dionyza misleads Pericles. We are also, however, reminded of the false grief of the actor playing Pericles—that as Pericles is misled, so are we misled.

Pericles is now said for the first time to swear; he swears never to wash himself or cut his hairs. He abandons entirely to chance and enters into a deep state of passivity and what we would call a state of depression. Gower declares that the tempest is now in his soul: “He bears / A tempest which his mortal vessel tears, / And yet he rides it out!” (4.4.29-31). He does not return to his kingdom but instead stays upon the sea. He now has no place, and the formless sea is the perfect image for his soul.

In the concluding scenes of Act 4, we see how Marina has transformed the brothel into a place where divinity is preached and souls converted. Shakespeare alludes not only to the life of a saintly nun in describing how Marina acts, but also to the Vestal Virgins and the Puritans (4.5.1-9). Her life encapsulates the Western tradition of sanctity, from Rome to sixteenth-century England.

Her greatest conversion is that of Lysimachus, the governor of Mytilene, whom she calls upon to show the honor to which he was born. As Boult says, the holy words spoken to Lysimachus have made him “cold as a snowball” and left him “saying his prayers too” (4.6.133). Marina persuades Boult and the Bawd that she can make them money by teaching the skills of the properly educated maiden—singing, weaving, sewing, and dancing. Gower adds that of discourse to her skills. “Deep clerks she dumbs” he says (5.Cho.5), which means that she can interpret and comment upon books better than the scholars can.

Pericles, in his wanderings, returns by chance to Mytilene. Lysimachus and the lords of Mytilene come onboard and see the catatonic state of Pericles, who speaks to no one. Lysimachus wonders at the cause of his condition and suggests that Marina might cure him. Marina is described by Lysimachus as “all goodness that consists in beauty.” He also speaks of her “sacred physic,” and she has apparently healed others. Does she heal by means of music?

Marina is not perceived by Pericles. Her song is not heard. In fact, Pericles pushes Marina away. He does not see that which is his salvation, and, as Marina says, even offers violence.¹² She protests his behavior, and only when she speaks of her parentage does he awake to her presence. What he first hears is something about her fortunes. What she emphasizes is her descent from kings. Is he awakened by her claim of descent, or by the malignity of her fortunes that she says are equal to his?

When questioned, Marina declares herself as belonging to no place, because she was not born on any shore. Her name brings an immediate response from Pericles, as does the story of her birth and the loss of her mother. Upon discovering who Marina is, he suddenly hears heavenly music and falls into a deep slumber. He has heard the music of the spheres, which reveals the harmony and unity of all things.

As White says, Pericles is the only Shakespearean character who actually hears the music of the spheres.¹³ And the one who hears the music of the spheres can only be the one whose soul is in perfect harmony. The unity in the flesh of Antiochus and his daughter is replaced by the harmony of the soul.

In his sleep, Diana appears to Pericles and tells him to go to her temple in Ephesus. The vision leads him to set aside his plan to take vengeance on Cleon and Dionyza. That vengeance is to be taken by the commons on whose justice Cleon had said that Pericles could rely upon.

What we have at the very end is a triumph of Diana of Ephesus. It is apparently she who brings about the miracle of the reunited family. It was in Ephesus that the riot occurred of the craftsmen defending her cult against Christianity.¹⁴ The only Christian allusions in this play are to be found in the reflections of the fishermen. The fishermen, we recall, have the task of providing cover for the naked and cold Pericles. They recover part of his heritage, his father's armor, but it is no longer as it formerly was. It has been changed by the sea. Moreover, the armor no longer belongs to Pericles, the heritage is no longer his, but he must beg of it of the fishermen. What the fishermen ask in return is that he remember from whence he had it. Are we to think of the loss of the heritage of honor and its recovery by means of those who are fishers of men? Do we have here an allusion of the rescue of classical civilization by means of the Church? Whatever exists of the former understanding of honor, we owe it to the Church; if it is no longer what it once was, we have no other armor or cover to put on. As the Second Fisherman says, “We'll sure provide.”

Nevertheless, the final restoration is through the goddess whose cult represents the confrontation between Gentile and Christian. The miracle, however, is not attributed to the gods alone; Pericles asks who else might be responsible, and the answer is Lord Cerimon. It is he through whom the gods have shown their power. White calls Cerimon, rightly, I believe, a Baconian scientist, who claims to be able to unlock the secrets of nature in such a way as to correct nature herself and make man like a god. As Pericles says to Cerimon:

                                                                      Reverend sir,
The gods can have no mortal officer
More like a god than you.

(5.3.61-63)

To understand this play, I suggest that we must begin with Pericles' “inflamed desire” to taste the fruit of what he believes is the celestial tree. We have a Biblical echo of the temptation of the tree of immortality. He is the noble knight who will give up his life for the sake of the beautiful that he believes to be also good. He reminds one of Aristotle's description of he who should study politics—he who yearns to make intelligible his desires and actions and to know that they aim at the good.

What he discovers at Antioch forces him to leave Tyre and Tharsus and to become a wanderer upon the sea. He cannot rule in either city. The storm brings him to Pentapolis. Is it necessity and chance then that direct Pericles' voyages, or is there a hidden providence that directs them? We have no clear answer.

Pentapolis is not so much a city but a court where ceremony and manners are practised. In Antioch he had to solve a riddle; in Pentapolis he has to show his prowess in arts and arms. In between Antioch and Pentapolis, in Tharsus, he shows his great beneficence. Pericles, however, never practises the art of statesmanship. His virtues all seem to be prepolitical or perhaps transpolitical.

Marina comes to be because of his practice of the arts and his courage. Courage and beneficence are the specific virtues for which he is praised. What then can the connection be with the other Pericles, the Athenian statesman? The answer seems to be that in both the love of beautiful is to be found. In the older Pericles, that love of the beautiful expressed itself in the desire to turn the city into an artifact. As Plutarch explains, such an attempt confuses making with doing, art and virtue, and the concern has to be with virtue, not with the beauty of the artifact:

For it does not necessarily follow, that if a piece of work please for its gracefulness, therefore he that wrought it deserves our admiration. Whence it is that neither do such things really profit or advantage the beholders, upon the sight of which no zeal arises for the imitation of them, nor any impulse or inclination which may prompt any desire or endeavour of doing the like. But virtue, by the bare statement of its actions, can so affect men's minds as to create at once both admiration of the things done and desire to imitate the doers of them.¹⁵

Marina is the consequence of Pericles' gentlemanliness, his knightly deeds of courtesy and grace. It is because he has the arts of arms, music, dance, and manners that he is given Thaisa. What replaces the political are arts and manners. What is perhaps most striking in this play is that there are no political structures that can shelter human beings. We have the court of Simonides, Cerimon's house, and Diana's temple as the places of refuge and rescue.

The man in whom the love of the beautiful is dominant begets the beautiful that is not only beautiful but good. He has had experience of the beautiful but as divorced from, and indeed, in contradiction to the good. He cannot know the beautiful as the good until he sees that possibility in the existence of Marina; until that happens, he remains in a state of despair and utter passivity. What Marina is, as Lysimachus says, “is all goodness that consists in beauty.” In her the good as the beautiful comes to be. She shows the possibility of the noble, of the conjunction of what appears to be the beautiful and the good. That conjunction between appearance and reality is not a necessary one, as is shown by the princess of Antioch, and human passions and the elements alike seem to prevent it.

The conjunction of the beautiful and the good may especially be difficult because of the formlessness of Pericles' world. One notes that in Antony and Cleopatra, a play written at about the same time, 1607, as Pericles, we also see the formlessness of the new dispensation that Augustus will bring. As Antony says, “Let Rome in Tiber melt and the wide arch / Of the ranged empire fall!” The images are of water, and the world is now a fluid one. We move, as we do in Pericles, from place to place, and yet we are never certain where in the Mediterranean we are.

The final resolution is a private one. Only Pericles hears the heavenly music, and Diana comes to him in a dream. Moreover, the restoration is not that of a city but of a family. What is shown is that the love of the beautiful cannot by itself attain to order. It is dependent and passive, but out of it there arises the possibility of the beautiful that is good. We must keep in mind that what is desired is not merely the good, but the beautiful that is good. Cerimon seems to provide the good but as the useful. The beautiful good, if it exists, seems to be private, for it has no public support but must make its own way through a world that attacks it on every side, seeking either to exploit or to destroy it. In the play, we have assassins, pirates, bawds; and of the passions of human being, we have the lusts of kings and indeed of men of all nations, as well as murderous jealousy and ingratitude.

The harmony of soul achieved at the end is the coming together of all three parts of the soul—the appetitive, the spirited, and the intellective. We see in Marina that perfect combination. The conjunction of the beautiful and the good cannot be complete without knowing, or without the intellective part of the soul. However, the bringing together of all these parts is perhaps only possible in a dream or in a play. That conjunction would indeed be a divine blessing. Since the dumb shows have made us especially aware that what we are watching is the imitation of an action, are we not also aware that only in a play is a Marina possible? According to the directions of the play, we too hear the music as well as see the vision of Diana. We share in the private vision and wonder of Pericles.

In the Athenian Pericles, the love of the beautiful, according to Plutarch, expressed itself politically in the attempt to make the city into a beautiful artifact. In Marina, what we have is an education in the arts, and especially in music. The education in music, according to Aristotle, is propaedeutic, the necessary moderation of the tendency to enthusiasm or the madness that the gods may induce in the soul.¹⁶ Is what we have of Athens then contained in education? In Cerimon, Pericles recognizes the divine. As White remarks, “At first to Pericles, it is kings who are gods, or should live like gods, kings like Antiochus. Simonides echoes such sentiments. Now it is the wise man who is divine.”¹⁷

Is it now necessary to begin with the love of the beautiful as the way toward understanding? It may be the only way to escape chance, necessity, lawlessness of every kind, melancholy, and the brutalities of the marketplace. In sum, the dangers of relying on that part of the soul that yearns for the noble is shown by Shakespeare. We no longer have a soul formed by a city, instead we have the soul of the sojourner or the pilgrim. The other possibility of escape is to know as Cerimon knows. But do not more souls yearn for the beautiful than seek to know?

We are not shown in Pericles how the wise man may cure “the disturbances / That nature works” and what it means to say that man can be like a god. The most striking aspect of the play is the way in which the ancient understanding of honor is, as it were, preserved by the knowledge of the natures of things. It is Cerimon who restores to Pericles the treasure that he had lost (3.2.97-104).

Since we see the restoration in a play, and, as we have said, we are made especially aware of the difference between action and speech, the narrator and the play, are we not also made aware of the art of the playwright who has brought about the vision of this miracle? It is not Diana, after all, but Shakespeare who has brought us to Ephesus. It is not the art of Cerimon but that of Shakespeare who has shown us the way to escape the fool and death.

Notes

1. Line citations follow the Penguin edition of Shakespeare's Complete Works, gen. ed. Alfred Harbage (Baltimore: Penguin, 1969).

2. “Heritage in Pericles,” Shakespeare's Late Plays. Essays in Honor of Charles Cross, ed. Richard C. Tobias and Paul G. Zolbrod (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1974), 92. Howard B. White points out that, “Shakespeare's Gower is not the true Gower. The verses which the play attributes to Gower are not only simpler than the dramatic version; they are simpler than the real tale of Gower from Confessio Amantis.” (Copp'd Hills Towards Heaven: Shakespeare and the Classical Polity [The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970], 96).

3. See Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, VI, ed. Geoffrey Bullough (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966), 355.

4. White, 98.

5. “The Unity of Tragedy, Comedy, and History: An Interpretation of the Shakespearean Universe,” in Shakespeare As Political Thinker, eds. John E. Alvis and Thomas G. West (Wilmington, Del.: ISI Books, 2000), 43. See also John E. Alvis, “Introductory; Shakespearean Poetry and Politics,” op. cit., 9.

6. 571c-d.

7. White, 102.

8. The name “Cleon” reminds one of the demagogue Cleon, who lived at the time of Periclean Athens.

9. Mytilene reminds one of the condition of Vienna in Measure for Measure. See especially Harry V. Jaffa, “Chastity as a Political Principle: An Interpretation of Shakespeare's Measure for Measure,” in Shakespeare As Political Thinker, 203-4, where Vienna is described as a city of “monasteries, nunneries, whorehouses and prisons.”

10. One is reminded of the nations who come to court Portia at the beginning of The Merchant of Venice. There the qualities of each nation are examined by Portia and Nerissa.

11. 392d, 393c-d, 601b.

12. Posthumus Leonatus strikes Imogen in Cymbeline. He too does not perceive his salvation.

13. White, 110. Richard II hears music, but it is not the music of the spheres. The music heard at the end of the Merchant of Venice is the music of the house. Lorenzo does say that the harmony of the spheres is in our souls but is not heard “whilst this muddy vesture of decay / Doth grossly close it in” (5.1.58-65). In Cicero's Republic, 6.18, those who hear the music of the spheres are the men “who, blessed with pre-eminent ability, have devoted their lives on earth to studying the ways of heaven.”

14. Acts 19.23-41.

15. The Lives of Noble Grecians and Romans, the Dryden translation, ed. and rev. Arthur Hugh Clough, 2 vols. (New York: The Modern Library, 1992), 1:202.

16. See the Politics, 8.

17. White, 111.

A version of this paper was read at the 2002 conference of the Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft. I am grateful for the opportunity to have presented it there, and grateful as well to Paul Werstine and Karen Branan for helpful responses to the essay.